Series Green Spotlight: Food Waste
Increasing sustainability through reducing food waste
Let this fact sink in — at least one third of the food produced by humanity is never eaten. We waste even more food in the United States — up to 40% of food is lost at some point in the supply chain. The resources expended to produce wasted food is staggering. According to Imperfect Foods cofounder & CEO Ben Simon, growing food that goes to waste ends up using up to 21% of our freshwater, 19% of our fertilizer, 18% of our cropland, and 21% of our landfill volume. As you might imagine, the carbon footprint that results from food waste is significant. Roughly 8% of global emissions can be attributed to food waste, and reducing it is one of the top three most effective solutions to fighting climate change.
To best understand how to fight food waste, we must first understand why it happens. We see that shifts in supply and demand for certain crops may result in price changes that make it unprofitable for growers to sell certain food. Packers and distributors fail to organize the logistics correctly (e.g. vegetables will spoil en route). Grocers and retailers (~40% of waste) commonly refuse to accept certain food that fail to meet certain superficial criteria (e.g. fruit will be tossed for not being the right shape, color, etc). Consumers themselves often overbuy food that ends up spoiling (~44% of waste). Food waste comes from everywhere across the value chain.
To learn how to best solve these issues, Series Green invited Sunny Reelhorn Parr from Kroger’s Zero Hunger Zero Waste Foundation and Alexandra Coari from ReFED. They shared a three part framework to reduce food waste — we must invest in solutions that prevent, recover, and recycle food waste. Respectively, this refers to stopping waste from occurring in the first place, redistributing food to people, and repurposing food waste for other products (e.g. energy, agriculture, etc). To learn more about this, ReFED’s details 27 interventions that move the needle most on food waste.
The most interesting emerging companies in the food waste space today include the following:
Prevent: Shelf life extension technology, logistics solutions, forecasting, and tracking analytics solutions for retailers and grocers
- Apeel Sciences (shelf life extension)
- Cambridge Crops (Shelf life extension)
- Afresh (Supply Chain)
- Pepper (Supply Chain)
- Winnow (Forecasting)
- Hazel Technologies (Shelf life extension)
- Leanpack (Tracking Analytics)
- Joa (Recipe planner)
- Imperfect foods (Imperfect produce)
- Misfit Markets (Imperfect produce)
- Seal the Seasons (Frozen produce)
Recover:
- Goodr (Secondary Resale)
- Copia (Secondary Resale)
- Food Maven (Secondary Resale)
Recycle: Includes upcycled food creation, waste to feed, waste to energy conversion
- Spoiler Alert,
- Food Maven
- Pulp Pantry (upcycling)
- GrubTubs (Waste to feed)
- Grubbly Farms (Waste to feed)
- Full Cycle Bioplastics (Waste to bioplastics)
- ReGrained (Waste to ingredients)
Food waste costs the global economy $2.6 trillion per year. There remain many opportunities to build massive businesses that solve this important problem. If you’re an investor or founder tackling food waste, we’d love to talk to you. Please reach out to Jess Eastling at jessica@better.vc, Priscilla Tyler at priscilla@trueventures.com, Stephen Wemple at stephen@spero.vc, or Shawn Xu at shawn@floodgate.com to get looped in.
